


In Poor Taste

by horrorgremlin (catstuff)



Series: Once Bitten [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Abusive Relationship, Assault, F/M, Heavy Alcohol Use, Vampires, mild misgendering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:07:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23654359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catstuff/pseuds/horrorgremlin
Summary: Grayson lands half on top of Mariah, still holding her arm in a death grip, crying loudly and messily. He feels feverishly hot, his hips pressing closer and his flushed face falling onto Mariah’s shoulder as he sobs. Mariah thinks he’s been drinking more than just vodka.
Series: Once Bitten [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1702981
Kudos: 1





	In Poor Taste

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings: long-term abuse dynamic, heavy intoxication with alcohol, mild misgendering, and assault, some of which is sexual in tone.

It’s later than usual when Mariah gets home, hours after sunrise, and the streets are more populated than she likes on the brisk walk to her apartment. Inside, the blinds are already drawn, and the relief from the mid-morning sun is a welcome comfort after the odd night she’s had.

Well, if she reflects on it honestly, most of the night hadn’t been all that unusual. A couple shady transactions made in dark halls and alleys, bickering with her business partner, a leisurely meal after taking inventory for the night as the darkness outside started to fade. But the right kind of new information can make everything else shrink into the background.

 _Grayson._ It’s ironic that she’d failed to recognize his name, given that, honestly, he had barely changed it. But she has to admit the new version suits him, probably better than the original. What disturbs her is that she’s been out of the loop enough to have completely missed this whole development. She hasn’t thought about him in years – well, much – but she used to know his movements like her own breath. Now that he’s back in her sight, he seems so much further away, and she doesn’t like it.

He smells like cigarettes now, which is disgusting, but something about his blood earlier tonight had been familiar to Mariah in a way that had less to do with her palate and more to do with her gut, or something deep in her brainstem. She relished that, and how easy it still was to get a reaction out of him. But a few hours after she left him quaking with rage, she found herself trying desperately to remember if she had felt this simultaneously charged and ambivalent about him when they’d last seen each other.

When Mariah tried to dig back in her memories, she found she was hardly in them; they were all of Gracie – of Grayson. The endearing way his face scrunched up when he was uncomfortable. His nervous, wide-eyed innocence when they first started hanging out. His constant indignation with the world around him. She remembered the way he looked when he screamed his voice raw at her the last time she saw him, before he stormed out. And curled around it all, a calm detachment from the feelings of guilt and responsibility that she’s fairly sure were once there.

-

_Mariah smiles when she finally hears a knock at the front door. She’s already purring a greeting as she pulls it open, but the words die halfway through as Grayson charges into Mariah’s shoebox of an apartment._

_“How long,” she — no, he demands, “do you think you can keep doing this to me?”_

_Mariah slowly closes the door again. She’s not exactly an honest or innocent person, but nothing of immediate significance comes to mind. “What are you talking about?”_

_“Everything,” Grayson roars. “Haven’t we had this conversation before? You can’t just text me whenever you’re bored and then treat me like shit!”_

_Mariah’s eyes narrow. “Would you like to sit down?” She gestures broadly toward the shabby sofa._

_“No.” Grayson’s hands are shaking but his voice is steel. “I’m sick of your games. I’m sick of trying to guess what you’re thinking. I’ve been acting like your pathetic fucking lapdog, and I’m fucking disgusted with myself. But you.”_

_And this is the part that Mariah will never forget: all the passionate vitriol that an already acerbic personality can muster, focused and turned on her. The casual adoration she got too used to seeing there isn’t gone so much as turned to stone and smashed with a hammer, sharp and hot and rotten. Grayson is wild-eyed and flushed and lousy with tears. It looks like he’d been crying already before he got here._

_“You_ let _me. Year after year, you used me, and I let you, because I don’t have any fucking self-respect! Because of your shit!”_

_Grayson has gotten mad at her before, furious even, but something about this is qualitatively different. Something about this is cracked wide open and tumbling down a steep, jagged incline. Mariah doesn’t like it._

_“You destroyed me.” The words carry years’ worth of quiet devastation. They fall like a cinderblock._

_Mariah feels the impact from somewhere far away as she instinctively wraps herself in her trademark frigid superiority. Defensive anger floods in._

_“I was your friend. I helped you.”_

_“You killed me!”_

_“I made you better!” Mariah’s voice rises now, too. Grayson’s face is smeared with tears and probably snot, but his bloodshot eyes are suddenly crystal clear. He looks like he’s never heard anything so stupid and he’s absolutely radiating resentment. Mariah’s never seen him this raw, and he looks so fucking alive. Doesn’t he see it? “With all the shit I’ve done for you, where the hell do you think you would be without me, Grace?”_

_“Anywhere but here!” His voice is starting to crack, but he doesn’t lower his volume. “Literally anywhere the fuck else!”_

_“And what about the other night, huh? What about going back to how it was before?”_

_“You stay the hell away from me. I don’t want to hear from you or see your fucking face, ever again!”_

_The door slams before Mariah can figure out what to say next._

-

She never did figure it out. But earlier tonight, as soon as she had recognized him, she hadn’t needed it any more. As always, once the scene was set and the curtain rose, Mariah found she knew her lines by heart, and it was easy to perform her usual façade of sadistic and seductive, flexibly fine-tuned to get what she wants. It was like nothing had changed, it was so easy to taunt him, though the context and the element of surprise admittedly did a lot of the work for her.

She resists admitting that his presence caught her by surprise just as much. It wasn’t part of the performance and she doesn’t need the liner notes. Her kettle reaches a boil and she lets it shriek until she’s jostled by loud laughter from outside her window, three stories down on the sidewalk, and thinks about having to deal with disgruntled neighbors and turns it off.

Stirring in sugar, she decides not to hold anything against him. Whatever reason Grayson had for keeping away so long, Mariah is prepared to forgive and forget, and now that she’s seen him again, undead and unwell, she has no reason not to. Her mind buzzing with ideas and her body buzzing with the tail end of a feeding high, it’s hard not to get worked up about all the possibilities. She wishes she could take a bath to try and relax, but her tub has been grimy and disgusting since before she moved in, so she just takes her cup of tea to her room like she always does and sets it on the nightstand.

Getting out of her clothes and into her bed after a long night’s work is an enormous shift in comfort, and she stretches her hot, tired body against the cool fabric of her sheets. Despite efforts to relax, she keeps coming back to Grayson’s blood. It’s amazing how an individual’s blood is like a signature, some intangible subtleties impressing a consistent portrait, even with other confounding variables. Something in her knows him, and his blood remembers where it came from.

Of course, she’s no sort of expert blood taster, whatever she claimed earlier when put on the spot. She loves the bullshit she comes up with sometimes, and how easily most people buy it. It’s no trouble getting what she wants; she just has to decide what that is.

-

_It’s almost noon when Mariah hears a loud pounding on her apartment door._

_After the trouble of waking up, putting on a robe, and dragging herself to the door, she’s annoyed to find through the peephole that it’s just Grace. Mariah pulls the door open as he’s beginning to knock again, and Grayson stumbles inside. Mariah catches him, not by choice but because she’s standing right there, and then shoves him distastefully back onto his own center of gravity before closing the door._

_Grayson just stands there, a little wobbly on his feet and stinking of cheap vodka. He stares at Mariah vacantly. He doesn’t say anything._

_“What is it?” Mariah snaps. “What’s so important that you had to come here and wake me up in the middle of the day?”_

_“You,” Grayson starts, then hiccups and falls silent again. His far-off stare turns down toward the floor. Lines of harsh daylight bleed into the room around the edges of the window shades. Mariah considers just going back to bed and leaving him to hopefully sleep it off on the couch._

_Then he speaks again. “You…” His voice is small and pitiful, in stark contrast to his ruthless knocks on the door. His pupils stay unfocused on the floor between them. “Why don’t you like me any more?”_

_What the fuck? How drunk is she?_

_“I like you fine,” Mariah says flatly. “I include you in my plans. I spend time with you. At night. When I’m awake.”_

_“Why?”_

_“Why what?” Mariah is still lost, but it’s always easy to lean on sarcasm. “Why do I sleep during the day? We’ve talked about this before.”_

_“Why do you pretend like you don’t know how I feel about you?”_

_Mariah’s thoughts skip a beat. “Do you really want to talk about—”_

_“You used to like me.” Grayson is despondent, roughly wiping budding tears from his face with the damp sleeve of his sweater. “You used to need me.”_

 _He steps forward. Mariah steps back._

_“Grace,” she says, a weaker warning than she’d like._

_“‘Grace, your hair is so pretty!’” His sarcasm is thick and cruel, and Mariah recognizes the words as her own. “‘Grace, you’re_ the only friend I have left _!’”_

_Mariah realizes she’s backed against the sofa and raises an arm in sloppy self-defense. Grayson grabs it and yanks awkwardly; they both tumble down. Grayson lands half on top of Mariah, still holding her arm in a death grip, crying loudly and messily. He feels feverishly hot, his hips pressing closer and his flushed face falling onto Mariah’s shoulder as he sobs. Mariah thinks he’s been drinking more than just vodka._

_“Grace.” Mariah tests the grip on her arm and finds he has it solidly pinned to the back of the couch. Grayson is crying practically right into her ear, and she can smell the sour alcohol on his breath again. Her pulse is picking up. “Grace,” she tries again, a little more insistently. Trapped under his weight, she can feel both of their hearts pounding, even through the barrier of two pairs of breasts._

_“Fucking bite me,” Grayson chokes out bitterly through his tears._

_“I don’t fucking drink vampires. Get off of me.”_

_The sobs have turned into something between a moan and a whimper. Mariah waits. In a pause between crying sounds, quiet and plaintive, Grayson says: “Please?”_

__

__

_It’s so quiet and strange that Mariah hesitates, uncertain whether she actually heard it. Then impulse takes over: with her free hand, she grabs a fistful of Grayson’s tangled hair, twists his head back with obvious disregard for his comfort, and sinks her teeth into his neck._

_Grayson cries out in pain, and then resumes sobbing through a low moan. Mariah hasn’t tasted another vampire’s blood before, and it’s different from human blood in a way she doesn’t really care for, though some of that could be the alcohol content. At the same time, it tastes exactly like Mariah remembers it tasting back before she turned Grace, when they were young and fresh and wanting to own the world didn’t come with so much emotional baggage. She savors it greedily, humming and growling into Grayson’s neck._

_By the time Mariah decides she’s done, Grayson’s breathing is slow and regular, if heavy, and his grip on her arm has slackened. Mariah shoves Grayson off herself and onto the other side of the sofa. He reaches to cling to her as he’s pushed away, and the gesture fills Mariah with disgust._

_“I want to go back,” Grayson says in that same small, too-vulnerable voice, “to how it was before.”_

_“No,” Mariah says, her voice hard as a brick wall. “You don’t.”_

_Grayson’s eyes are welling up again. He looks like she wants to say something, anything, to diffuse or undo or continue whatever he thinks is happening here._

_“Go home, Grace.”_

-

Grayson has always worn his heart on his sleeve – he can’t help it – but back then, there had been an increasingly palpable sense of something more urgent, some kind of fundamental details that he couldn’t make into language, that Mariah couldn’t coax or squeeze or parse out of him, and she didn’t like it. As cool and composed as she’s always been, and has always prided herself on being, that unspoken fire in his eyes has always been difficult for her to gaze into for long, too bright like the sun and burning straight through to her heart, yet drawing her like a moth to flame.

She can feel that same burn roaring back to life now from navel to neck, as if no time has passed at all, but it no longer feels obfuscating; it’s clear, crystalline, perfectly lucid, _aligned_. She knows what went wrong. She knows how to win him back over. She can make everything perfect.

On the nightstand, next to her untouched tea, is one dark vial laid carefully in a jewelry dish. The label is marked with only a handwritten “G.”

This time, she knows what she wants.


End file.
